Transcripts
1. Class Intro: Good day! Welcome to 1930's Character Design, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the class. Welcome to 1930's Character Design. In this class, we are going to be showing you how to make unique, custom, original characters based on the style of the 1930s. In order to know how to make your characters look authentic, when you dive into a little bit of the history of early animation that is the 1900s, the '10s, the '20s, and, of course, the '30s, because a lot of the reason why characters look the way they did was because of the limitations of how animation was created. That is that they had to actually draw on celluloid sheets. They'd ink the back. They put two sheets together. Take photos one frame at a time to make the animation. So because of that, that's why characters looked a certain way. We're also going to be talking a lot about Fleischer Studio. The studio that you may have not heard of. They were a huge competitor to the Disney Conglomerate back in the '30s, and they made some really awesome artwork that I like way better than Walt Disney stuff. So, if you haven't heard of them, it's going to be a really exciting thing for you to learn, and they have got really crazy awesome characters. So, once we are done going over the history of animation, we're going to show you how to create those pie eyes, funny mouths, having funny eyebrows, rubber hose limbs, and the big white Mickey gloves. Believe it or not, those gloves existed well before Mickey. There's a reason why those characters looked that way which you will then know so that you can create your own custom characters. For the class project, we're going to be talking about something called anthropomorphism which sounds complicated, but really it's about making something that's not human, appear more human, and lovable. On top of making really awesome 1930's designs, Jake Bartlett has actually teamed up with me, and he is putting out a class on character animation. So, you're going to take the characters that you created in this class, and you're going to bring them into Jake's class, and he's going to show you how to animate them. Any of the animations you're seeing in this video right now were done by Jake. So, making your character look really awesome and authentic to the 1930's is one thing, but once you animate them, you can actually trick people they're from the 1930's. So, even though in this class, I'm going to be using a little bit of software and we're going to be setting files up for Jake, you can still actually just take this class with pencil and paper if that's what you're more comfortable with. It's not really a software class, so it should be easy for you to jump in and just start sketching. Well, that's it. I hope you check out the class. We'll see you in a moment.
2. Enamel Pin Contest: We're going to talk about a contest. That is all the details are actually going to be in the description of the class. But, Apple Metal who I've teamed up with before for my pin tool class, which I hope you've seen, they did some really awesome pins and over the years I've used them to do 10 or so pins. They do really awesome quality and they're great pins and you can, of course, sell them on Etsy, sell them wherever you want, giving away to friends, whatever they want. They're pretty inexpensive, but they are really awesome. So, for the first few weeks of this class is going to be a contest, and I'll break down the rules and how you can win, and how many people are going to win, and all that good stuff. But, if you're watching this class after the contest is over, please check them out at applemetalcn.com and email them at info@applemetalcn.com for a quick quote, and they will be able to turn you around some awesome pins really quickly. Check them out again. I've been working with them for so many years and they've been awesome. If you check out my pin tool class, we already did a contest there years ago, and you'll be able to see some of the students that actually won and see their pins.
3. A Brief History of Animation: Hello and welcome to 1930's character design. So, in order to understand how to basically make your character seem believable and authentic to that decade, it's important have a little bit of an understanding of the history of animation. That is because, for you to make your characters look like they're from the 1930's, it helps to know why the characters in the 1930's look the way they did. The reason they looked the way they did, was mostly due to the limitations of animation at that period. The way that things were being drawn, the way that they were being photographed, and the way they were being brought to people on the big screen had a lot to do with why they had certain features. Of course, that is the pie eyes, the white gloves, the rubber hose limbs, things of that nature. There's a real reason for why all of those things existed and most of it came down to simply having to draw the frame over and over, how to make sure you can actually see the hands, and how to make the legs and arms bend really easily without spending a ton of time trying to understand detail, because it was really time consuming to make a film back in the early 1900's. So, just to give you a little bit further history, before we get into the main characters that you might recognize like Mickey Mouse, it helps to get a little bit of a base for animation in the 1930's and how it got there. So, one of the first films to ever be made that's considered to be hand drawn animation, the traditional sense, is this film called Fantasmagorie. It came out in 1908, it was animated by a French filmmaker named Emile Cohl, if I'm pronouncing that right and I'm not positive. Basically, what they did was draw every frame by hand. So, we can watch a little bit of the video and you get an idea of how primitive it is, and how early the technology is. All these animations are hundreds of different frames to be drawn. The reason why it's a negative, is because in early silent films, they were using these black title cards, and they had white letters on them. So, this illustrated thought that it made sense to make the design of their animation look the same. So, even though they drew it with black lines on white paper, they actually take the negatives, reverse them, and then photograph those, and turned it into this film that you're watching. So, it's definitely interesting and it's all over the place as crazy and it's hard to follow, but this is technically the first one ever, and and it does feature something pretty interesting. If we flip over into Photoshop for a second, we're going to see that this is one of the characters in this film. What's interesting about it, is they knew at this point to keep it really simple. The reason for that, is because they had to draw hundreds and hundreds of those pages, and they need to make sure the detail could be picked up by the primitive cameras at that point. So, you can see that the face has very little features. It's basically two eyes, a nose, and mouth, essentially a happy face. But what's interesting about that, if we flip it to how it was originally drawn. That's how it would be originally drawn on paper. It's already got circular black eyes, and this is almost essentially the beginning of what and becomes the pie eye, the oval black eye that was used on tons of characters in the 20's, 30's, and even a little bit into the 40's before they started trying to add more features. It's just really interesting that technically the first animation ever started to utilize that, and then other animations, you'll see that they tried to make a little too detail, and you just lose it all anyway. So, this animation was actually really smart and thought out in that matter. So, the next film that was really important was a film called Gertie the dinosaur, and what's more interesting about it, is it's credited for having the first character on the screen that is actually lovable. It's cute. Winsor spent a lot of time making this dinosaur come to life, and apparently, he even timed his breathing to his to try to make everything about it more lovable, and this is what something that Walt Disney would take and run with. He really made a big point of making his characters come to life, and making them really lovable, and cute, and funny. Humor was a huge factor in the early 9900 because these are all silent films. So, without being able to have all these title cards telling you what the story is about, it was easier to get humor across in animation. You also know that I'm starting this film late. I'm going to put links for everything in the class, but I'm starting it a little bit into seven minutes because that's where the actual animation is. A lot of it before that was actually just a film, and it was Winsor bragging that he was going to make a dinosaur life. But the detail is amazing. It's pretty funny. I mean, him taking down a tree and eating the whole thing is pretty hilarious. There's just a lot going on here, and it's the first time that you're actually, there's a story being told and there's a character that's funny and cute, and it's a lot different than the Fantasmagorie one who watched. It was just like stream of conscience throwing a million things at you. It was going so fast and crazy it was hard to even understand what was happening. That is why Winsor McCay is credited for a lot of what animation is today even, because he was the first to pioneer some very important things that Walt Disney would then take and show on billions of movie screens. Speaking of Walt Disney, you might be wondering, where's Mickey? We'll, we're going to get to Mickey. The interesting thing is even though Mickey Mouse is kind of one of the most famous and most you've probably Steamboat Willie, a lot of different things happened before Steamboat Willie that made animation the way it was. So, long before Mickey Mouse, there was a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. I say long before, it was really only a year but back then it was really important year. That is because at this point Disney and Ub Iwerks, which is a really amazing illustrator that Walt Disney worked with, were already working together for quite a while and they were putting out the series called Alice comedies, and because of costs and technical restrictions, and things they had stopped doing that. So, what they decided to do, was to make a character. Well, technically they were told to make the character. They needed to find someone to basically put out these films so people could watch them, and the way shots were played back then, they weren't on TV of course, because they hadn't been invented, so they would play these cartoon shots at the beginning of big movies. So, try this out, and things like that just to get the audience laughing, because they didn't have commercials and things. So, it was just something they would play before a movie. But beyond that, when they were making these and to go in front of films, they had to find distributors and it wasn't easy to just start. There was no YouTube, you can't just post something online. So, they had to get Universal Studios to distribute it. So, Disney's distributor at that time was a guy named Charles Mintz, and he told Walt to create a new character basically that they could sell to Universal. So, Walt along with Ub Iwerks, created this character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and it ran for about a year. They did a whole bunch of shots, and it was a really great character, and honestly I think it's a more fun cool looking character than Mickey. But the problem is, that after the success of it, Mintz actually stole the rights to it and he started his own design studio, and he left Walt and Ub Iwerks on the curb. He basically took all of Disney's staff and put them into it because he offered them jobs and Walt had no cartoon to use. Something they started to figure out in these cartoons what's really interesting is that they had a lot going on at once. They could actually repeat the images. So, what you're watching is more or less the same thing repeated over and over. What's neat about that, is they're able to fill in another 30 seconds or whatever, with using more or less the same drawings over and over. So, there's a lot of repetition at this point. Which of course this changes as the technology gets better and better, but nonetheless, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was a pretty cool looking character even with his big train hat, and all this silly stuff which later on he would avoid. But it was a really cool looking character, there's no doubt. So, what they did once they had this character taken away from them, as they sat down and decided they need to create new character. So, they made Mickey Mouse, and Mickey Mouse in a lot of ways actually looks like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. But what's also interesting too, is that once Oswald went on to do his own thing, there was mice and certain cartoons of Oswald that looks so much like Mickey Mouse, it's ridiculous. So now, we get into a little shot called Plane Crazy, and this is a shot that Ub and Walt worked on in Walt's basement, and this is I believe still in Kansas City, that's where Walt's originally from before he went to California when they started Disney Studios. Basically, they made this character and it was Mickey Mouse, and it was in a plane and I'm scared to death to show you basically all of the shots. So, you have to just look this up, I'll put it online, but you can get an idea of, he's a all black character, he's got the shorts that he's known for. He's got most of the features he's known for, but he doesn't have the white gloves yet. He actually does have pupils but he's got eyes around them. He's got this big block feet and his hands a lot of time or just circles, or they're circles with what they call sausage fingers. Another thing they decided to do was to draw only three fingers and a thumb because they could draw them much faster and you wouldn't have quite as many digits to work with. It was just like a clever time saving technique that turned out to be how we draw characters moving forward, most the time we draw them like that. Another thing, is they didn't want to give them paws like real animals have, because they wanted you to believe them as a human. They want to you to look at a mouse as a real person and to fall in love with that character, and that's why Walt became so famous is because he knew how to make you fall in love with his characters. Of course, from there Steamboat Willie came out. So, Plane Crazy was never actually released, or wasn't released at first anyway because they couldn't find a distributor. So, instead, they put out Steamboat Willie and that took off, and from then on, Walt Disney went to become what he is today, and this is always credited as one of the early ones. Most of you probably maybe heard of of the name. Here's a little interesting chart that shows you how Mickey evolved from the beginning. Of course, they're adding color to things that didn't have color that time, like he didn't have blue shorts because it was black and white, and they're just showing you the differences and how he evolved, and of course, he evolves way beyond what this chart shows. But it is interesting to look at the very early ones, how he had just the block feet, black hands, really easy to draw, and then they added the gloves, they added the shoes that became pretty famous. I always found the ears years really interesting, because they did this for a really long time. For a guy who's so obsessed with having things look right and realistic, Mickey has these ears on the left and right of his head just like animals have their ears. So, when he turns his head 45 degrees, those two ears should be overlapping. So, to get away with that, he started drawing one ear at the top of the head, and one ear at the side of the head, and it's interesting, because that's totally unrealistic, and it doesn't make any sense other than that you can see the ears more clearly. You would think that goes against everything Walt believed at the time, but he did this forever and ever afterward. So, it's really interesting. I don't know. But just one little thing that I picked up, so that's the idea is. I recommend you watch some of these early cartoon shots and try and learn from them, and then see where they go from there, and if you don't pick up little things like, "Oh they do this a certain way always, or they have this facial expression," that's the best way for you to make your cartoons look really awesome.
4. The Amazing Fleischer Studios: So I want to talk about the beginning of animation and Disney because I think most of you will be really familiar with Disney and Walt Disney and all the things they've put out, and of course Mickey Mouse. But those aren't really what inspired me to make this class. What inspired me actually it's a game called Cuphead. Came out in September of 2017 I believe and it had this really authentic 1930s look to it, and it was really fun. It's actually a great game too, and it's available on Xbox and PC. I definitely recommend that you check it out. It reminded me, I actually got a book when I was about 12 years old from my grandfather, and it was a Tex Avery book, and it was the golden age of animation. It reminded me a lot of that, and I think that's kind of why I got kind of obsessed with this style, and I remembered all these kind of different things. When I was a kid, I watched this black and white Popeye's, and it kind of just brought me back to somewhere or like a nostalgia, which is funny because I'm not a super nostalgic person, but it reminded me like wow, that there's something not only fun and cool about animation and the way that the characters were drawn, but they had a bit of a dark kind of creepiness to them, and I think that's what I liked. As much as Walt Disney is amazing and they've done some really cool things, I'm not the hugest Disney fan. I haven't even seen most of those new Pixar movies and stuff that everyone loves. But Disney is cool, great, but there's actually a whole studio that is more inspirational to me, and they are Fleischer Studios, and more specifically, Max Fleischer who was kind of the Walt Disney. He had some brothers that were involved in it and family members and things that were all involved in the studio, but he was kind of the main director-creator. What was interesting about him is unlike Walt who's from Kansas and that went to California and everything was kind of light and fluffy and cute, this was a New Yorker, and they had New York artists, and they were living in a tough time in New York in a rugged city, and I think that came out in a lot of their cartoons. A lot of their cartoons are violent, they're grittier, they're more dark. They have hell, they have devils, they have sharp weapons that are trying to kill their main characters. But somehow, they still have this kind of cute, lovable vibe to them. So it's a much more interesting style that they were doing. On top of that, they pushed this crazy surrealism where the storylines were so crazy, like Mickey's out trying to make a plane or trying to steer a ship or whatever, and he's trying to make Minnie fall in love with him, and then you have Betty Boop who was like sleeping in a frozen room and killed by the fire, and then she falls on her fireplace and goes down in essentially what's hell, and she's dancing with devils. I mean it is a totally different world, this Fleischer Studios, and that is much more inspirational to me. I like their characters better, and I liked kind of their cartoon better. They're more fun to watch for me. They don't feel like the for kids at all. They're just kind of like just this crazy art movement. So that's why I skipped over him in the last video, it's not because he wasn't important, but because he was so important that he has his own video. I did skip over a couple other ones though. I should mention like Felix the Cat. Felix the Cat was also really revolutionary because he was the 20's guy. He fizzled out by the 30's, but Felix the Cat really the groundwork for a lot of Disney and Fleischer did as well. But I can't make this class all history. There's so much information. If you guys want to learn more, I could put all kinds of links, and maybe one day, I'll add a bonus video with in-depth history of it all. What's really interesting about Fleischer Studios is again, their characters are a little bit crazier. They have this character called Bimbo which was a dog, and he was awesome. He's one of my favorite looking characters. Of course, he changed a lot through the years. But one of the interesting things about him is that they had this really great character that everyone loved, but probably you've never heard of Bimbo, or a lot of people that don't know much about, the 30's haven't heard about him. He did introduce a character that is much more famous, probably the most famous Fleischer Studios character. They did do pop Popeye, but they didn't invent him. They actually found a character from a comic strip and they offered to animate him, and they made him a life on screen, but they didn't technically create Popeye. They just created the animated version. So the Fleischers decide that they need to give Bimbo a girlfriend. So he's kind of dancing around in this hall and he meets this girl on the stage. Of course, at this point, she's unnamed, and you can see that she has dog ears because she's supposed to be this kind of mix of a human and a dog. This was them kind of pushing things maybe a little bit too far in that they were trying to do too many things at once, but it's a really funny shot. What they ended up doing is they worked more on Betty, and they got rid of those dog ear because they realize that didn't work and that was a little bit creepy and weird. The amazing things about the shorts with Fleischer is how crazy they go. So one of them that I really love is The Old Man on the Mountain. Another thing I'm doing is in these 1930's cartoons, there is sound, and sound is a really important part of these, but sound as far as I know, is very copyrightable, so I just can't play it. So you have to watch these on your own, but you can tell that things are getting a little crazy here. You have a lion who's putting on skates made of rabbits and he's flying down this hill. Of course, there's a little bit of repetition, but there's something just so funny and interesting about the way that these characters work. Another thing that seems to happen a lot of course is that these guys kind of fall in love with Betty. They think she's attractive, and then she kind of like bats away. There's this almost uncomfortable feeling like she's going to get sexually assaulted for lack of a better term. She always gets herself out of it because she's a really strong interesting woman which is I think why the character is so loved even to this day, is because she was kind of the embodiment of a really strong. She was sexy, but she had a little bit of curves, but she was tough. She got herself in these crazy situations, but she got herself back out. Yes, you'll start to notice is if you watch these Fleischer characters, they really work on having more interesting background characters. So as cool as Betty Boop was, as cool as Popeye was, it's the background characters to me that really made the characters a lot more interesting. Here's a picture from a short with Betty Boop, and we can see this Daisy, and Betty doesn't want to eat her vegetables, so this Daisy is trying to make her. It's a funny short, but the interesting thing is this anthropomorphism where they're turning Daisy into a lovable little character. I think that's what Fleischer did really well for me is he made his side characters, like the ones that you only see for a couple seconds, really awesome. In this shot, this Daisy tries to feed her, she says she doesn't want it, so the Daisy tries to eat it to show her like it's fine, and then he dies, which is humorous because of how horrible it is. Another one, and talking about Cuphead, is Swing You Sinners which is a really crazy, creepy shot which takes place in like a graveyard, and there are skeletons and tombstones, and all these things going after Bimbo, and it's just a really cool shot. The Cuphead creators really said that this one was like the main inspiration, so you should definitely check that out. Like I'm saying, these Fleischer ones, they've got these trees come to life. They're really creepy. They're not as cutesy. They've got these kind of worked weird frogs. It's just trippier, it's crazier, and that's what I like. I think it's interesting they turn kind of everything into a character. Here's a whistle like for the end of the workday. He whistles that it's lunchtime and then he starts eating his sandwich like he's on break. It's that kind of humor that I love, and I find it really interesting. The other things you should be starting to take note is the lack of eyes on some of the characters, the way the hands look on some characters, because that's what makes them so fun. This one is a really cool character. This is a bomb. He's sweating and nervous that he's going to take off. Another thing is if you've played this Cuphead video game, you'll notice that as you go through more of these cartoons, you're going to start seeing eyes in things that are straight pulled from this, and they are like a solid homage. Like these eyes are literally in Cuphead. A lot of the characters in these cartoons are in Cuphead. They're their own versions of it, but they really heavily have an homage to these other characters. They took lots of elements, and that's how they made the game look so authentic. There's a lot of humor. This is a point where this bear comes up on The Old Man on the Mountain, and Betty doesn't want to step in a puddle, so the bear takes off his fur, throws his jacket down. He's in a pajama suit and she walks over. It's that kind of thing that is just lost today that I find pretty funny. Here's an example of a mouse in a Fleischer cartoon that looks a heck of a lot like Mickey Mouse. I think that kind of stuff is interesting. Of course they've got the gloves, they've got those lines in them, and these gloves that people are calling Mickey hands are really just not Mickey hands at all. He just became the most famous. Right here your sharp weapons and knives. Fleischer Studios is awesome. Please check out all their stuff. The other cool thing about them is they have a website, fleischerstudios.com. They have a YouTube channel. They lost the rights to basically all of their films which is really sad. The family is still going, and Fleischer Studios is still a thing. It's still selling merchandise, especially Betty Boop and stuff like that. Unfortunately, they don't have the rights. I'd love for you to support them. Definitely check out their website, flesicherstudios.com. They've got a few books that are really cool that I've started to read, and there's one about Max Fleischer that's written by his grandson. There's just a lot of stuff that you definitely need to check out, and I definitely recommend that you go to the website. This one here by Ray pointer is great, The Art and Innovation of Max Fleischer. This is the other book here called Out of the Inkwell: Max Fleischer and the Animation Revolution, and it's written by Richard Fleischer. I just recommend you check out all these books to help out that family. They did some amazing things, and as much as everyone knows about Disney, everyone should know about Fleischer. To me, equally as important. Obviously, they didn't go on as long, but really cool stuff, and I think you should check them out.
5. Anthropomorphism & Your Project: Okay. So, for your class projects, we're going to talk about this thing called Anthropomorphism, which I mentioned a couple of times in the videos before this. But here is the dictionary definition, It is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. That is a weird way of saying basically, you can take a salt and pepper shaker, you can add a face and hands, and nose to it and you're making it human. Same goes with animals. You're just trying to take things that aren't human and you're trying to make them human so that people can fall in love with them, and that is what cartoons are based on. That's really important in cartoons. So, when you're creating your own piece of artwork, I want you to use that. So, essentially, that means that I want you to pick any inanimate objects or an animal and turn it into your own custom cartoon animal. A thing in my class is, I don't like to try and get you guys to draw what I did. You could if you wanted some practice, but I think the idea is that I want to push you as an artist to try and create your own original content. That is something that you might notice about me, if you look at all the artwork I've done. I don't even think I've ever really done a piece of artwork that's really I didn't draw this other character. I know a lot of artists that are mashing characters up. They are taking whatever's popular, maybe Rick and Morty, and The Simpsons and they're mashing together. Because it's easier to take a character that people already love and make a piece of artwork with that character in it. But hopefully, try and avoid copyright and then sell it. Because people love the characters, so they like your art but they love the character. For me, I don't get as much enjoyment out of that. I'd rather make an original character or original illustration. It doesn't have to be character, just an original piece of art that doesn't have that nostalgia that I'm picking up. I'm not taking that shortcut and that doesn't mean that I'm above those people. Those are some amazing artists. This is not something that appeals to me as much. This is the closest I've gone to actually trying to make something look like it's from a certain time period or pulling inspiration. There's this character that I'll post of, actually, I can show you here. So, there's this character that I was working on that I haven't quite finished yet, and he is confused and he's scared, and he is probably one of the closest in terms of he looks a lot like Wimpy from Popeye. Here, he is here walking down the street in New York, and I'm thinking about adding a ghost in this top corner that he's scared of, and so this is an unfinished piece of art. But this is what I mean, I still want to create original content, original artwork, and original designs. But I think it's fun to use like kind of that image, that hand is exactly from a Wimpy cartoon that I saw. So, that's the kind of thing, just like that cuphead stuff, just trying to make your own artwork, make your own original stuff that you can sell and do whatever you want with. But it's pulling back from that 1930's in certain cartoons like Popeye and stuff like that. So, this is my character, Mr. Liquor, of course I took a liquor bottle and I turned it into a character. This was a really fun one to draw and this is what I want you to do essentially. I want you to pick an inanimate object like I said or any animal, so if you want to pick an inanimate object just think of anything that you loved drawing maybe you want to make a pencil. From my case, I really love guitar, so I made a guitar character that you're going to see, and same thing, I don't know, do I love money? I guess so, but in my character, it was really cool. So, just do whatever character that you can think of and it can be an animal. I like the inanimate object a little bit better than the animal, because I feel like animals are overdone. People already love animals. That's why there's so many dog cartoons and cats, and all of these different animals that already exist. I think it's more interesting to take something really random, like a pair of scissors and give it a face and arms, and try and figure out how you can make that pair of scissors come to life. I think that's more fun, but go ahead and try and create your own thing. I'm really amped to see what project you guys put up. Even if you put up rough sketches, again, this is not a software class. This is a drawing class, so even though I'm going to be using a little bit of Photoshop and Astropad, and Procreate, it's actually really just an inspiration class, and I want to get you to drawing. So, if you want to use pencil, paper, whatever you're comfortable with, whatever drawing tools you use, go ahead and use those.
6. Drawing Pie Eyes: Okay. So, let's talk about drawing eyes. Eyes are one of the most important things about any of these early characters from the 1930s, and that is the stereotypical pie eye shape. What's interesting too is if you look at these Funko pop dolls, they've got these really simple oval eyes. They're taking whatever character, the IP of that. They're getting the rights to it. They basically just have these circular eyes like this, just nothing big about them and that those eyes just make them cute. I mean, they're selling millions of these toys, which is interesting because clearly they're taking that idea from these early 1930s cartoons. So, it shows that they're pretty popular. I mean, the Cuphead video game sold a few million copies. These pop head dolls are taking over the world for the last few years. So, there's something interesting about this 1930s movement, and I found some really cool artists that are really inspiring. But let's talk about the eyes. So, the eyes are pretty straightforward. A standard eye to start with was just one of these big ovals. Now, keep in mind of course that you don't have to do anything you don't want to as far as keeping it the same as them. You'll notice that in my moneybags drawing, I actually didn't use pupils at all. I use money signs. I just thought that that was more humorous that way. But this is the basic kind of eye that you're having, this kind of long oval. Then a lot of the times what they are going to do is simply put in a little pie shape and that's why you're getting the term pie eye. I think some people will call it something different. But that's the essential idea of the pie eye. The reason for that little tick that comes in there is that it's supposed to be a highlight essentially. So, all they're doing is adding this triangle and that in fact kind of gives you the feeling that there's light hitting the peephole, and it just gives a little bit more character. So, there's tons of different ways to actually draw your eyes even though the basic idea is that you want something along these lines of these pie eyes. There's still a lot of different ways to do it. So what you need to do, I think what's interesting about this cartoon style, is that you need to stick to those basics if you can use the white gloves, use the eyes, the rubber hose limbs and then try and figure out other ways to make them kind of interesting. So one of those ways is sometimes you can have your cartoon with just the pupils or like I've done in a few of mine, you can actually add some eye shapes. So if we draw a pupil, just like we've been doing here and I will quickly shade that in. You just need to push your ideas a little further. That's the pupil, this is the outside eye and now we've got the eyelid coming down, that's coming up. I find that that tends to make it look a little bit more just creepy, whatever reason having those eyelids. Again, of course everything I'm doing here is really rough. It's not about perfect quality. It's just for getting the idea down. But now, suddenly, for me anyway, you have a slightly more interesting, clean that triangle up a little bit, slightly more interesting idea. Another thing, of course too, is you can change, the triangle can be tiny, it, could be huge it could take up most the eye, it could not, so and so forth. But I think that's kind interesting. I'd like to add a couple of little details here. So, you get like these wrinkly eyes and it's just things like that that you want to play around with and another thing is adding the eyebrow can really make a difference impact. So, if you've got the eye going up like this. That's going to give you one feeling of the expression that the person is doing or if you get rid of that and the eyes going like this, they might start to look a little more angry, should actually be the other way around like this, like you're on the outside. They feel that and they might start to kind of look more mad. It will have a better effect of course if you draw the second eye. So let's start that second eye in there. Again, I'm not really worried about having a perfect symmetrical drawing here. So we could give him an angry uni-brow, this kind of thing here. But, generally, if you've got the eyebrow going down towards the center, that's the angry look. This can be made a little bit more excessive by adding some mouth. You have to get the idea. I mean, if the uni-brows are a little too much, you can get rid of those. Thsose eyes can get a little eyebrows and a small trim. So, when you're drawing your characters, essentially, you just want to spend time trying to experiment with different ideas and you can go on Pinterest or you can just go anywhere online and type in 1930s characters and try to find some authentic ones so that you can use those as inspiration. Because what you're going to need to do is use those basic features and then figure out ways to make them a little more interesting. So, I was talking before about the size. So, let's just say that these ovals are basically exact same. So, you've got here there's three different eyes and this is showing you an idea here. So, now things that you going to experiment with is, is your pupil this big or is it this big? These are things that you can experiment with. You have three different types of eyes just by changing the pupil. The same idea goes if we have, let's draw in a couple different outlines for eyes again, and you know you need these outlines. You can go with just the pupil. Another thing to do I've seen a few times, I think that Bond character had is maybe the pie is actually in a different spot. So, it's almost like the ovals would turn sideways or you could actually have the oval go to the opposite way of what we just drew there. You can, of course, have a circle, rather than the oval. You can have a little bit more of a Pac-Man eye. Of course, you don't even need the cutout in it and things like Betty Boo for example. She pushes it a little bit, and that she's got those oval eyes, she's got the pie eye, but then she's got that extra line to start of show the adjure the eyeball. If this is your eyelids, this hole outside, and then this is the edge of eye, and this would be where normally there's color and then that's her pupils. So she's got a little tiny bit more character to it. So, that's pushing that a little bit more. So that's the kind of stuff that you want to experiment with. Drawing the different ways, you actually find that you can get so many different expressions and things just out of shaping the eye a little bit differently. It's interesting without knowing a ton about it like this. This eye here almost looks kind of scared, like he's frightened, just based on where that eyelid is coming up from from the edge. Another thing you can definitely experiment with is the shape of the eye doesn't have to be an oval, like I keep drawing over and over. Maybe you've got this kind of thing. It's all just trying to experiment with different concepts. I'm just quickly drawing in that pie shape as I go but maybe that's the shape of your eye. It doesn't always have to be the same or maybe it's more like this. So, it just goes to show that your idea is basically to your own imagination. You can do anything you want and you can experiment with trying to get different ideas but I definitely think that the most important thing is that you try and look at examples of what's already been done and what kind of characters have certain different types of eyes. Maybe that you like Popeye the best, and you try and look at how Popeye's eye is done and things of that nature because the best way to make your illustrations actually look like they're from the 1930s is to reference 1930s pieces and features and things like that. So, if you go a little bit too crazy, let's say that you draw this. Let's say that this is your eye. It's not to say that this doesn't work. But now you're starting to push the boundaries maybe a little bit too far in that maybe this no longer looks like a 1930s eye at all. It's not to say you can't do it but maybe in that scenario, you've gone a little bit too far. So try and find references. Feel free to push a little bit past what they were doing but try and stick in that area and that's how your characters will look more authentic to that time period.
7. Creating Mr.Liquor: Okay. Welcome to the Mr. Liquor time lapse. For this character in particular I had the idea in my head and I pretty much got exactly what I wanted within two quick sketches. So, I was really off to the races on this one. I knew it was liquor bottle. I had the idea of how that liquor bottle would be shaped. I knew that I wanted his eyes half closed. I find that that looks a little bit creepy for some reason. It's makes him look a little bit more like he's trying to sell you something for some reason. I don't know why. Also, I encourage you to take a look at photographs of what people wore and did in the 1930's and a lot of times I saw a guy with mustaches and stuff and that's why I decided to include a mustache and these big thick eyebrows. It's just about you have to try and be creative with how you make your character look unique because you're most the time going to those same eyes and use those rubber hose limbs and I'm going to use those white gloves. You don't have to do anything of course. You can totally do something more unique than that. But those are the signature look for the 1930's. So, if you want to look like it's from the 1930's, having those features makes it a lot more believable, that it's more authentic and so on. But you still have to try and figure out well, I want my character to look different than everyone else's. So, just experiment with color, experiment with facial gestures, eyebrows, having those eyelids coming down like I was saying and then try and think of some unique way to present it. Maybe you draw a background, maybe don't. Admittedly, whenever I was doing my illustrations, I spent a small amount of time coming up with the character and inking him and coloring him. But the background was what took me forever. I'm not a painter. I don't have really any experience and I've done better watercolor. This is a digital painting but nonetheless it took quite a long time and there was a lot of detail that I didn't need to put in here but it was really fun project. In fact. It's probably the most fun I've had drawing that I can even recall just because I was able to turn my brain off and just come up with a bunch of different things and customize the labels for something that I thought fit well the piece and just have a lot of fun. The greatest part about this stuff which I know that not everyone gets the opportunity because I could take this piece of artwork that I was really proud of. I thought I did a really good job with and I was to send it over to Jake Bartlett and he made awesome animations out of them. That's why you should definitely take his class and I'm going actually be making a new character and I'm going to take his class because look at that. What brings it to life more than putting it into animation and stuff. I'm still smiling. I'm so amazed by how cool it looks. So, thanks Jake. But there it is in black and white as well. So, I hope you enjoyed this time lapse and we'll move on from here.
8. Drawing Mouths: All right, so, in this video we're going to talk about the mouth. There's a lot of different ways to draw the mouth, there's so much more of variety, even more than the eyes, but a lot of the time, there's certain ones that are definitely more common. One of the things that I've noticed a lot is, you'll get this kind of shape and then, it's up to you, you could add the line across here to sort of separate the teeth. But, you want one of those kind of big perfect teeth and try not to make them too small because, again you have to imagine that they were drawing this on a piece of paper then they are photographing and all these different things. So, you can't have too much detail, that's something really important for your characters, don't add in too many little details or if you do, just understand that you're pushing a little bit outside of the 1930 style, which is okay. I'm contradicting myself a little bit because, it's all about creativity and just enjoying what you're doing and enjoying the characters that you're making. So, it's up to you, how authentic you want them to actually look, but there's two mouths, same idea, a lot of the time you'll see the teeth go both ways, you get an expression like this, this is an angry expression, right? Then you can have whatever, the nose is going to land here and the eyes that character I drew already in the eye video but, something like that, you get that mouth, our mouth shape. Another thing I've seen is, a couple times, is that the teeth go back and forth, looks like a pumpkin or jack-o'-lantern or something like that. You can go crazy and again, I'm just using the same mouth shape to start with, you can have angry, sharp teeth like this, then you can have a tongue of course, if you want it in there. So, there's a lot of different ways to do it, you can go like this and only show just the top, just make sure those teeth are nice and big and then you got your tongue going out like that. It's fun to show the tongue for some reason, when you're having this Mickey Mouse nose, a lot of the time what you'll notice is that, they don't even draw teeth at all, maybe teeth are too scary for Walt Disney, he wants to make his characters look out light and fluffy. So, you can shade that in, I didn't bother shading this in but of course, these are already theoretically shaded in right, like this. But, that's an idea that you can go with, no teeth at all and you can experiment with a different shape. So, again you don't always have to have that shape, it can be just a circle, you could sometimes you'll see them whistling, that is weird shape going on or if it's whistling from the side, maybe it is more like that's the mouth, and this is the teeth. So, whistling this's a little bit of a funny one but, that gives you an idea, just play around with the things. This is a sort of maybe more sad but, just like the eyes, it's important to look online and try and find examples that you like and find characters that you enjoy and see where the different mouth sheets are. If you go ahead and google something like whatever your favorite character is, and then type in their name, and then type in model sheet, and a lot of the times, you'll find the sheet that an illustrator made to kind of show people exactly how to draw this character. So, when they were drawing these drawings in the 30s, a lot of time you had a really good artist who would draw one frame and then he would draw almost five frames later and you had the in-betweeners that would come in and draw in the one in-between. So, maybe he drew every other frame and they would draw in that one in-between and that allowed him to say, "This is exactly what I want it to look like." He could get more done in a day, because he's actually getting, he's skipping two frames and you have an in-betweener who just has to figure out, draw the line in between this page and that page. So, it's easier to do the in-between work but, that's what the model sheets were for, to make sure that they were still following the basic principles of what the characters should look like. So, finding a model sheet for a character that you like is also a great way to be inspired. I'd like some of those in my Pinterest Board as well, which I'll post the link to. But, that's the basic idea for mouth, it's really straightforward, I didn't do a ton of different examples but, one another one I guess that we could show you, is that Betty, is going a little bit more feminine, she's got this thing going on where she's got the cute lips or whatever. So, you could draw a line and then you've got this going and then a little bump from the bottom of the lip, or if they're singing or talking, another thing actually which I just drew incorrectly is a lot of times they're just using rounded corners, you want to just keep everything nice and round. I may push that a little bit too far there, that one's a little bit rough looking but, let's do that again, let's go. Something along these lines [inaudible] their teeth. That gives you an idea that Betty was pushing that a little bit more and that she had those kind of stereotypical curvy, female lips, she didn't have these like just big plain circles, she actually had lips, which a lot of characters didn't have. So, go ahead draw some faces and hopefully you're drawing along with me, that's the idea. So, I know these videos are less exciting, there are not so many visuals jumping out at you. But, you should be drawing along with me, get a sketch pad or whatever and just try and come up with something cool.
9. Creating Money Bags: Let's just take a moment and appreciate this music, Okay? That's good, isn't it? I don't know who the artists are that did most of these songs. I found them on achive.org. I believe it was awesome public domain websites and some of them were unnamed unfortunately. But, we will talk about drawing not Mr. Moneybag, just moneybags, I thought a cool name for him. You guys have a better idea? Tell me. So, the main thing I did when I'm creating these characters is I play a lot with just making them fun, creative like a creepy like I was saying before, car salesman kind of thing. Talking to a little bit about the inking and I ended up using a studio pen brush in Procreate, but then I played with the settings a little bit to give it a hairy fuzzy edge, and that is a personal preference. I might play around with not having that. But, I found that the way that they inked onto cells, and then they put the color on behind it, and because of the quality of the system, and when the photos were taken the lines looked a little bit fuzzy. So, I thought the best way to bring that forward into this era is to get the ink a little bit of fuzz. But, they were using traditional pen nibs, so you could just use a fountain pen or something like that or a fountain pen-like digital brush. That would get you technically a very accurate way because you'd be using the similar tool to what they did. When I was trying the backgrounds I use this wet acrylic brush because again the backgrounds always had more depth, more shading, and they really contrasted well against the character in the foreground. Another thing was some of these files is because I wanted Jake to animate them and I wanted to keep them as high quality as possible and have as many editable layers. I actually sometimes would duplicate the file and get rid of the character for layering reasons and then add them back in Photoshop because to use a high-res file in Procreate, I was doing a 12 by 18 at 300 dpi for most of these. Then, there's a limit to the amount of layers you can have in Procreate, which I think is about 23 or something not so that the program runs well on the iPad. But, that's going to be relevant to you depending on what software you're using. As always here is Jake's magical animation powers making him rocking back and forth and look a little bit like he's drunk on money. Yeah, Jay does an awesome job. So, I congratulate Jake's in the end of these. I can't help myself. That looks awesome. Yeah, okay, bye.
10. Drawing White Gloves: Okay, so we're going to get into drawing hands. So, one thing I did put together is a Pinterest board, so if you go to Pinterest.com/JonBrommet you'll find all my Pinterest boards. I don't use it as much as I'd like to, but it is useful and it's something that I do use from time to time because it's great for finding resources all over the web and posting them on here. So you'll see I made a board called 1930s and in it I have some subsections of Fleischer Studios, Disney, and then I have some that I hadn't organized and I may add some more before this class goes live. But, this will get you a lot of different inspiration and ideas to start with so you don't have to go searching online or watch tons of cartoons if you don't want to. Of course I recommend that you do, but if you don't, that's okay. So one of the ones we're going to look at is Preston Blair who is a really famous illustrator that was working in all of these awesome cartoons for so long. He put together this book about drawing and the basics of drawing for animation and one of them had a lot of hand gestures. You can find more examples of this online. But drawing hands is definitely one of the most tricky ones I find. So, because we're not using a real hand we're just drawing a cartoon version and you can simplify things a little bit. Preston Blair shows us this idea of, if you have the wrist coming here, you can go ahead and draw this big ball, that's the palm, from there you can essentially add a mitt which becomes your fingers, or a bump of the thumb which is right off where this wrist meets that circle that we drew there. You can bring that up and have this thumb here and it doesn't have to be perfectly realistic. Then from there you can start to break these into different fingers. So you can have this thing happening. A little bit tough to see. You can add a circle in here, and you can get that cuff of the glove at the bottom there, but there's a lot of different ways to draw your expressions. So, the idea is generally what I would do is take a photo of your own hand or look at your own hand and use that as reference and try and make your hand poses a little bit interesting because they're important part of it too. You can of course use- there's so many references online so you can use some as a basic guide and try to do something a little bit different. What you'll find is that the early Mickey also had this sausage finger thing. So, he actually had his fingers coming out like this and they had this weird connection and they were really rough looking. The palm was a little bit bigger, but you get the idea. Each finger was basically just a sausage like that and even had that space in between all the connects to them was that semicircle or the circle from the palm. But the general idea is that that's how you want to draw them. You want to have that light circle and then you draw in that mitt and then you put in your fingers. It's going to change a little bit for the different expression that you have of course. So, if you have, let's try to draw the circle. So if you have a closed fist and it depends on the position you're looking at. This is one of the references ones that Preston had to, but you got this thumb, something like this and then you've got these fingers and they're going to come around something like this anyway. This gives you an idea. Sometimes what they'll do is right here they'll actually leave that spot open. So, if you have your circle, I'll just draw in this lightly, and then you have a calf here, then we are inking it nicer leave that open like this wouldn't be here at all. Let's just draw that out. That's something that they did a lot, and of course they also did the lines, you got your lines here. From the illustrations that I've done in the past I've mostly drawn animals, I never really drawn hands very much. So this is my first foray into hands, so I'm way behind the curve. So a lot of you are probably way better at drawing hands than I am, but that's okay. The idea is just to practice and you're going to get better as you go. There's lots of poses and expressions that Mickey's used a lot with these in number 1 and you have this big huge finger coming out there and then the thumb is actually a pretty important part. Most of these I'm basing on this Preston Blair thing but you want to work with making sure that your thumb is pretty accurate and well represented because that's an important part of getting your character to look fairly realistic.
11. Background Design Inspiration: So, the backgrounds, we're going to talk about pretty briefly, because it's not a lot to do with your character design. So, it's almost another class entirely and you would be taught better by someone who is a more traditional artist. But, this shows you some ideas. Now, of course some of these animations are from way past the 1930s. But, you can tell that, they still use a lot of the same principles for a very long time in Disney until they moved to sort of digital animation, where they're using Pixar and it's 3-D and that kind of thing. But, you can see that all these characters are the same idea, where they're drawing these black lines. They have this black line, then they fill in the color, it's all flat, there's no shading. But then, the backgrounds have so much detail and shading and depth and that really makes the character pop off the background. It's just a really cool technique that was created way back in the 20s and 30s and it's just gotten better, better, and better and that is just one of the most important things about drawing your characters, if you want to have the background. As the background, can contrast a lot with the foreground. It doesn't actually have to have just simple flat backgrounds. I mean, a really detailed background and a simple foreground is actually more interesting. Those are the Disney ones you can see again and with the Fleischer ones, the same idea. Super detail, lots of shading and lots of depth and it's just a really heavy contrast to what the characters look like when they were just black lines and black inked lines and flat color. That's an important part of making your character pop off the background. It's done really well because that way you can tell what's going to move. Disney talks a lot about, the viewer wants to know what's going to happen and that's why if a character is going to run forward a lot of the times, they their lifted leg and arc to the back. So, it tells the viewer, get ready, I'm about to run. That's the same idea with these backgrounds. They wanted you to know what to watch because what's going to move. You knew if you saw this really detailed, intricate background, that wasn't moving don't worry about that. That's not the focus, that's the background. That was an important part of animation. So, that's a little bit of an idea. If you do want to draw some backgrounds.
12. Creating My Guitar Character: Hello. It's a guitar. Once again, the name is Juan. That is something I think it was like Freddy Frets or something like fret, as in fretboard. I don't know. I have to think about that. I'm not used to main characters, but kind of fun. So, here's my rough sketch for creating my guitar character and you'd see I played around with making it a little bit more interesting by putting on the angle, but because I wanted this to be easily animated, I had to go with a clean or a straight on. I think that makes it easier to animate for a beginner like me, probably like you, but it solves a lot of fun and I can always turn the character, it's a character site, and redraw in different pose and stuff. You saw before that, I'm playing with these hands a lot and I found these references, the hands are just killing me. I hate his hands. I think the final ones turned out cool, but hands are a lot of work, and they're not easy to do, and they're important, so I played around the hands a lot. As you can see here, I brought in moneybags and Mr. Looker for reference of the ink thickness and things like that because I want these three characters to have a series feel even though they're quite different. A lot of them have sort of one continuous feel. Then, I went back to that wet acrylic brush in Procreate to create this kind of curtain feel and I added these brushes and such. It's fun definitely using Procreate. If you never used the app before, it's a really great app. It's very much just you're taking Photoshop, the best drawing aspects of Photoshop and putting it into a nice app for the iPad because unfortunately, at this point, Adobe hasn't really made a worthwhile app for the iPad that I've used anyway. They just break them down into too many annoying little apps instead of one good quality app. But, I played a lot with this and I think it's fun if you're doing your illustrations, I recommend you try doing a background, and a foreground, and then having your character in between. It gives it a lot of depth and it's a fun way to draw your characters, but this is the guitar character animated, which definitely looks awesome. I love the foot tapping. I love everything. I love the eyes flopping back and forth. I did not tell Jake what to do. I just handed him the files and said make them awesome. So, that's it. That's my guitar character.
13. Put It all Together: Okay, let's talk about putting it all together. You've taken the ideas, we know how to draw the eyes, we know how to draw the hands. The rubber limbs are pretty straightforward, they're just curves, like take a rubber hose and try and curve it out. So, I didn't do a video about drawing that because that's both straightforward as it gets. But draw a thick line and that's your arm or your leg. So, once you get all those ideas and you're able to put them together, then now you're sketching, you're trying to draw just different ideas. Like I said, I would try and think of an inanimate objects and I would draw about a few different ideas. Sometimes I'll draw 50 ideas, sometimes I'll draw three. It depends on how quickly I get to something I'm satisfied with. So, here's an idea for the guitar, you can see the different types of layouts. I did electric guitar, acoustic guitar, I tried going up vertically, I try to going sideways, I tried a bunch of different things to try and get the coolest guitar character I can come up with. I wouldn't necessarily write off drawing another one. I kind of like the idea with the head and the head-stock, I think that's kind of funny. But overall, I kind of thought this character had the most promise, and that's the one that I ended up refining, and then you can see that this is what it looks like once refined. I got some lines here from Procreate. Because I was trying to get some lines straight but not too straight. Actually, a tip I should give you is that, all of these things are hand drawn, you have to remember. So, if you have a moment where you are drawing a straight line, try and draw a straight of a line as you can, but don't maybe use a proper vector program or something like that. You want to have everything kind of hand drawn because that's more realistic to the time period. Another thing is when you're putting together your files. So, I said before, this is drawing class not a software class. Meaning, that you can draw on paper if you want. But there is an amazing companion class with Jake Barclay, where you can actually take your character and animate them. So, if you want to go down that route then you are going to have to use software. You can use whichever software comfortable with, whether it's Photoshop or Illustrator or different sketching program. The thing that I recommend, is that everything you draw, keep it in a different layer. Now, you're watching Jake's class that I went a little bit far with that so and I drew the hands I had all different kinds of layers. So, let's look at my finished guitar. So, this is my finished guitar right here, my finished final file, and you can see that I broke it up into a trillion different layers. Then I had fore ground, the middle ground. So, those are the people, the middle ground is the guitar and the background is the curtains. You can see that I broke everything down hand, hand fill, left hand, left hand fil. So, I had all these different breakdowns for Jake. Because I didn't know exactly what it took to animate. So, I gave him all of these different layers and I figured, well, the more layers I give him the safer I am. You'll see in his video that he combined a bunch of them, because he decided what was going to be animated and what wasn't going to be animated. But I think a really good idea for you is when you're drawing, try and break them all down in a bunch of different layers. Sometimes when I'm drawing, I don't do that, I used to do that more when I was doing an Illustrator and stuff. But now, a lot of the times, I'll do kind of destructive drawing. Because it's more natural, it's how you draw on paper, everything is not perfectly broken into layers, and I feel like I am refined enough as an artist, I can go back and redraw parts or fix parts like that. However, for animation, keep your layers you want lots of layers. Of course, layers make it easy to refine things, change things. So, having layers is a good idea. But maybe you don't have to break it down in a million little bits like I did. But I do recommend it for this if you want to go ahead and animate your character, which you definitely should do. Because once these characters look pretty cool. When I was down, I was pretty happy with them. But once I handed them over to Jake and Jake animated them, he blew my mind. It was like they looked like they're straight out of the 1930s. I could fool myself almost. So, I was really happy with those. Back to our sketches. Basically, what I'm just showing you sort of the behind the scenes of how I sketch these things out. A lot of the time, what I'll do is, I don't draw these characters live in the class because I practice them beforehand. In order to have a good class, I want to have good drawings and good characters, and might go to software these days is Procreate on the iPad. So, it's not easy to record while I'm talking and things. It is easy to record a time lapse, which is why I've shown my drawings and time lapse but that's why I'm kind of going back and showing you the sketches of how I got there. You can see like experimenting with different hand gestures, different arms, and different things like that. Another thing I do recommend for animation is keeping your character fairly flat. Meaning, you're kind of looking straight on out of them as you can see in these drawings here. The funny thing about that is keeping them flat, is that I actually want to push that a lot farther for non-animation, and I'll show you an example of that in just a moment on a character that I'm actually working on that I'm going to actually complete after this class. But some other ideas I had these ghost I have, they were kind of cool and funny, and I played a lot with drawing this man, that was based on the wimpy character from Popeye. So, it's just cool to try and draw different characters and different things. Here's my moneybag sketch, and you can see that I tried to draw a lot of things. I think some of them are interesting. I like the idea of this old gas can. Obviously, I didn't flesh out the face. A lot of times when I'm sketching. It's just a matter of getting enough information onto the paper or digital paper in this case, that I remember what I was thinking and that I can build upon it in the future. That's why that gas can guide so rough, he barely has any face and definitely has no character. But it's just a reminder to myself, like, oh yeah, I like the idea of an old vintage gas can, like a rusty old gas can that is a character. I just think that's a fun idea. So, you can see of course that this is the moneybags. Now, this one's pretty refined here but this is our final, and I drew this bank vaults and stuff in the background. Of course, when you're drawing, you don't have to draw the background. But it is kind of an interesting addition to the art for me. You've already seen Mr. Liquor in the class but this one was so much fun to draw. So, I have to show it again. But it's really neat, this one went together really quickly. I knew exactly pretty much what I wanted him to look like, and I drew him that way which you can see here. So yeah, this one was really fun. When I started with this kind of cigarette box and then a cigarette and then that turned to liquor and a butcher knife. I don't know, I like dangerous things or adult things, like liquor and money, and cigarettes, and all these things. Especially, for 1930's, because those are kind of popular them right. Now, they're all about drinking and cigarettes and being a man's man, and this tough life. I thought that was fun from watching like Boardwalk Empire. I'm thinking of a butcher and stuff like that. So, I'm trying to capture these sort of tougher looking characters, because I like them a little bit tougher, a little more gritty more or, a little less Disney if you know what I'm saying. So, that was kind of cool. This liquor one came together pretty quick, so I only do two rough sketches and then I went on to kind of refine it. But, it was definitely a fun one, and if you want to see the final butcher knife, that's it there, and whether I do something with it in the future, I'm not sure. But there's always going to be things that don't make the classes, because they were fun to draw, but I can't do everything. So, I talked before about making sure that your character is flat for animation because it's going to make it a lot easier. But the funny thing about that, is that when you're drawing an animation or drawing a character especially the Disney stuff, they didn't want them to look flat. They wanted them to have a lot of depth to them. So, you can see over here, that I drew kind of this idea for my baseball character. Because I'm a big baseball fan. Then, I drew this kid-looking one, and then I started trying to figure out ways to make them look a little bit more depth. So by turning them on an angle, combining the two characters and kind of figuring out a way to do that, and I played with the leg length and things like that. This is all stuff that you're just going to figure out by refining, and redrawingm and redrawing, and redrawing. I haven't finished yet, but I've got a fairly refined sketch that I think is really interesting. I think it has a lot of depth to it. So, let's bring that above see, so see that. But yeah, this is my sort of refined character, almost ready to ink and start working on the background and stuff. But this guy really hard to animate, so I put him on the backburner until this class is over and I'll go back and finish him. But I tried to give him, I think it's so much more life to him. When he's looking all flat like this, it's just kind of cool. But it's definitely on paper. But once you start sort of moving them in a three dimension, and turning them in things, you get a lot more. I mean, interesting looking character. Another thing that they tried to tell you, the Disney people, there's this thing called the line of action, which is essentially, that you want to be able to draw this line that kind of curves to everything nicely. You don't don't want to have like a character that looks like that. If you can make them smoothly look like that, they're kind of more appealing to the eyes. So, you want your characters to have a little bit more curve and a little more fun. You can kind of see that too. If we go over to this layer of the man, it's the same idea you just want to have this line that goes through nicely and nice smooth kind of line. It actually probably goes the other way I guess more like this. So, you can kind of see that. But that's the idea. That makes for a more visually appealing character. So, these are all just different things that you want to experiment with. Try and make your characters come to life and try to make them look as cool as you can possibly come up with.
14. Outro: Okay, that's it. I hope you enjoyed the class. I hope you learned something. I hope you found the information very useful and that the history wasn't boring, but instead actually exciting. I know, I don't always find history exciting, but it's really cool in this case. So, I hope you learned something and that you're going to draw a really cool anthropomorphic character. That of course is maybe you're going to turn an inanimate object like a shoe into a character, or maybe you're going to make an animal. I really look forward to seeing your class projects. I also have an idea for your class project. On top of you creating your own custom character, I think it'd be really neat if at the end of your class we say "collab", and that is that you're going to draw an eye, a nose, a mouth, a shoe, whatever it is that you want to draw, and you're going to ink it and you're going to put it up in your project. Then what I'm going to do, is I'm going to combine everybody's different pieces and elements into one character. So, we're going to have all the students come together. We're going to try make a character. Might have to do a few depending on how many students, but maybe I'll draw the body or you could draw a body. We'll just try and combine everything and make it together. I think that'll be a really cool community project, and I'd love to collaborate with some students, and I think that's a super fun way to do that. So, upload your projects. Again, thank you so much to Jake Bartlett. It's been really fun. We've been trying to team up on a project for years, and this was the perfect one to do it on. His animations really brought this class to life, and I think that it will really come across to you when you see them. So, please take his class, that course is 1930s Character Animation. This is 1930s Character Design, his is 1930s Character Animation. So, take his class, I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Of course, as always, you can find me on all social media at Jon Brommet. You can go to jonbrommet.com to buy cool pins and merch and all kinds of things. Maybe I'll be adding some 1930s pins coming soon. All right, that's it. Thank you so much. I'll see you later.
15. ClassPromo: I would but before I forget, of course, I've taught lots of other SkillShare classes. So, you can check them out at Skillshare.com/Jon Brommet. You should be able to click my name anywhere in any class and be brought here or where of course search Jon Brommet and you'll see all of my classes. Of course, it's not showing this one because I have to be recorded in the future and it's really complicated. But basically, I've taught over 20 classes of lots of different variety of subjects from Illustration to program-specific like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to more hands on like block printing and gel transfers. I've taught a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and I think that there's probably something that you haven't seen. Sometimes they get lost. Also the way SkillShare works now, you have to actually click the "Follow" button to be notified if I post a new class. So please click the "Follow" button. But again, there's things like the Illustrator Speed Course which is super important. If you use Illustrator often, there's some tips and they will really increase your workflow. Monoline Illustration is another drawing class much like this but in a different style. My most popular class is the Pen Tool class and that's the class that I also have a pin contest in or had one back in the day and it's all about using the Pen Tool and there's the Block Printing class of course. So, there's so many classes. You can scroll through my whole channel and see all the different ones. Just make sure that you keep scrolling down because there's more and more and more as you keep on going and sometimes they seem almost hit in the way that SkillShare has kind of made them. You'll see on the next thing when there's a little button at the bottom that says "See More". So, you have to make sure that you click on that button in order to actually see the rest of my classes. So, make sure you click that and you'll see all the options and hopefully you'll check out my class and check on my channel and make sure to follow me. Sorry for all those horrible selfish promo but I want to make sure you guys are seeing my classes so that I continue making more classes, okay. Cool. Okay. Bye bye.
16. A Message From Future Jon: Wait, one more thing, I'm adding this, this is future Jon Brommet talking to you, I hope you enjoy the class that you just watched. Some of these classes have been recorded a few years ago. So I just wanted to give a little up to date on what I'm doing now. So you can see that I've put out a ton of classes potentially from the class that you just watched, as you may have been watching one of my older classes. So if you go over to my profile, you can click it somewhere on the Skillshare website or go to Skillshare.com/JonBrommet, spell just like that with no H, just J-O-N. You'll see here I've got things broken down in my newest classes. This may even look slightly different for you, because I'm putting out classes once a month right now. I've got my most popular classes, illustration, efficiency in Illustrator, Photoshop stuff, and then all of my other classes and make sure that if it's not already selected, you click "See More" to see the rest of it. So many different classes. I hope you guys will be inspired to learn lots more and hopefully you enjoy my classes and want to see more. If that's not enough, I'm at Jon Brommet on Instagram so you can check out my Instagram as well to know what I'm doing. I post all my new artwork there and of course let you know when I'm doing new Skillshare stuff and I've started a YouTube channel where I put short videos that are instructional and I obviously advertise with my Skillshare class, but short videos that I can't really put a whole-class out, I put them here on YouTube. I even do things like have conversations with other teachers, like Tabitha Park, I had to do that kind of stuff more often, and if you head over to jonbrommet.com. I've newly updated my website. I have a digital shop where you can grab my procreate brushes or other things like that. On top of seeing that my different portfolio elements and things like that, I've also got a Etsy shop, which I'll click here and it would open this. So you can buy all of my pins and different art things that I've created and I will ship them to you. From me, I've gotten them all produced here in my home and they look awesome and I know that they're cool. I just recently started a Threadless shop, which you could click here. Of course there's about in skill share and contact. Everything's from our website. This new Threadless shop has all my merch that can be printed on demand on a really weirdly wild variety of things like, I don't know, let's just click one of these things here. It's going to open a t-shirt, but let's just say maybe instead of a t-shirt, you wanted, I don't know, what? A duvet cover or shower curtains. Why wouldn't you want those things? I don't know. Anyway, I've got lots of different things going on. So if you'd like what I'm doing, please check it out more of that and I'll keep making more things. Thanks everyone, bye.
